Article: Public opposition risks to megaprojects - there is some method to the madness
I find public support and opposition to megaprojects - and the resulting critical project risks - fascinating. If you ever want to witness desperation in someones eyes, put a project engineer with a pile of Excel tables in front of a public audience during a Q&A session. I have watched project managers starting out with the highest aspirations of saving the world with their clean energy project and engaging the public while doing so, only to have them retreat to the legally mandated minimum after inadvertently fanning the flames of opposition with their outreach.
“People are stupid” is not a valid description of activists chaining themselves to trees, as obvious and convenient as it may seem at the time. Social movement theory offers an interesting take on the subject, talking about mobilization structures, grievances, and the power of us-versus-them narratives. This is a very helpful framing to understand if and when private misgivings turn into structured and social action.
We felt that there is a fundamental aspect that underlies public opposition risks that was underexplored: What shapes people’s perception of the legitimacy of a project? Meaning: on balance, is the government right to spend taxpayer money on this? Or is this gross misappropriation of my hard-earned taxes, better spend on something else?
How majority, morality and trust shape the legitimacy of megaprojects (Source: Witz et al 2021 / https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijproman.2021.01.006 )
In a new study, we identified three major dimensions that shape the legitimacy of megaprojects:
Majority: Is the project something that, in my peer group, conforms with the majority interest, values and emotions?
Morality: Does the project and its execution adhere to my standards of principles, norms and codes of behaviour?
Trust: Is the project proposed and executed by institutions that have my trust and a trustworthy track record?
These three dimensions are related:
The sum of individual trust shapes the majority opinion, and the majority opinion in turn shapes our perceptions of trustworthness.
Along the same lines, the sum of our individually perceived morality of a project shapes the majority opinion, and in turn the majority opinion significantly shapes our attention to trust.
And last but not least, a lack of personal trust in the organizations involved in the project make us very sensitive to questions of morality.
Our findings were just published in the leading project management journal (IJPM) under the title: “Asymmetric legitimacy perception across megaproject stakeholders: The case of the Fehmarnbelt Fixed Link”. You can read the full article here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijproman.2021.01.006
We studied a particularly interesting case, the Fehmarnbelt Fixed Link, as it had two opposing perceptions of legitimacy at the same time: Strong support on the Danish end of the tunnel, and mild indifference to outright opposition and boycot on the German side.
I am copying the abstract below:
With further emancipation of once subdued or marginalized stakeholders, a growing number of megaprojects face increasingly significant social resistance. Asymmetries of support for the projects emerge, rooted in different perceptions of legitimacy across different stakeholder groups. In this paper, we ask how these diverging perceptions of legitimacy develop across stakeholders of cross-border megaprojects. We conduct a multi-site ethnography at one of the biggest contemporary cross-border transport megaprojects in the world – the Danish/German Fehmarnbelt Fixed Link. Tying together three streams of the legitimacy literature in a new analytical approach, we suggest three dimensions of project legitimacy perception: trust, majority, and morality. In doing so, we provide a new integrative model of legitimacy perception in megaprojects. We illustrate how these legitimacy dimensions dynamically interact. We thus provide new insights on how project legitimacy is continuously renegotiated in megaprojects with implications for future developments of project governance.
Witz, P., Stingl, V., Wied, M., Oehmen, J (2021): Asymmetric legitimacy perception across megaproject stakeholders: The case of the Fehmarnbelt Fixed Link. International Journal of Project Management, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijproman.2021.01.006